Aboard the Enterprise-D, Pilot alerts Kirk from his neural graft cradle on the bridge: “Captain, I’m detecting an FTL window opening off the port bow.”
“On screen,”orders Kirk.
The viewscreen holds on the empty starfield, then a distant flash as a vessel drops into sub-light. The image punches in. Jury-rigged and battle-scarred, it is unmistakably a scavenger ship, no doubt drawn by the freighter’s emergency beacon, silenced too late.
The bridge tenses. As Kirk and the others look on, a smaller shape launches from the scavenger ship – a shuttle, streaking straight for the Waldorf Astoria. And the away team.
“We came to offer help,”observes G’Kar. “They have come to help themselves. Scavengers are nothing if not honest about their appetites.”
What does Kirk do?
A – Hail the scavengers. Warn them off. Tell them he has people on board rendering aid, then alert the away team to the company headed their way.
B – Hail the scavengers. Order them to recall their shuttle and clear out. Ready weapons.
C – Hold comms silent but go to ready posture, and get word to the away team at once.
CHOOSE!
END OF ACT FOUR
Previously On Amalgaverse…
You and 19 others have been stranded in an amalgam universe of myriad SF realities. All 19 are sci-fi’s Best of the Best. And then there’s you, uniquely qualified given your encyclopedic knowledge garnered from your world where these characters, their technologies, and their stories are fiction, beloved TV shows you have watched time and again. Together, all 20 of you have set off on the Enterprise-D, tasked with finding a way home.
For your first mission, you’ve decided to investigate a seemingly derelict freighter broadcasting an emergency beacon. An away team and puddle jumper have been dispatched to the ghost ship, anomalous energy pulses making beaming and communications a challenge.
After parking and cloaking the puddle jumper in the freighter’s hangar, the team crosses the airless bay into the ship proper. There, they make the decision to check out the waning energy signature of a containment field en route to the bridge. But they immediately encounter a utility unit that advances on them menacingly. Rommie connects to it and relays a shut down command that causes the robot to collapse.
Further along, they encounter a sealed door and Rommie informs them that the compartment beyond is exposed to space. She suggests locking down their current section and then unsealing the door since it’s the most direct route to the bridge – and that ebbing containment field. They do so. The door slides open to reveal an immense hull breach complicating their progress. Rommie leaps over the chasm and secures a tether to the other side, allowing the rest of the team to pull themselves over. But when they attempt to open the door to the next section, they hit an impasse. The door remains locked and will not respond to their commands.
O’Neill blows the lock with C4, allowing them entry into the adjoining compartment where they discover an android in a containment field, completing its regenerative cycle. When the android awakens, it informs them it is the caretaker of this freighter, the Waldorf Astoria, and warns them off pillaging its contents. Daniel assures the android, Maia, that they harbor no ill intent and asks for her assistance in accessing the bridge and restoring ship’s systems. But Maia remains suspicious. She requests a peer-to-peer interface with Rommie to confirm that your presence on the freighter is, in fact, benign. Rommie agrees.. Maia explains that her memory stores and parts of the ship were damaged after the freighter encountered an atemporal force during FTL transit. She offers to help the team access the ship’s systems in exchange for their assistance in tracking down and eradicating a mysterious entity that has boarded the freighter.
Maia helps the team access the bridge where they discover the freighter’s analysis of its encounter with the atemporal entity has yielded harmonics very similar to residual energy signatures from their crossings into this reality. This could hold the key to their return home, but the data is corrupted and Rommie needs time to decipher it. Daniel, meanwhile, notes that the life sign he detected earlier is fading, and he wants to check it before it’s too late. But Maia flags a more immediate concern – the likelihood that the ship’s core is in danger of going critical unless they vent the drive.
The decision is made to split the team.
McKay and Maia head to engineering where Rodney is startled by a half-dozen mechanical spiders that he, at first, assumes to be replicators. But Maia assures him they are simply the ship’s repair bots. Maia vents the drive but McKay’s reading of the data confirms they have only delayed the inevitable. In approximately 42 minutes, the core will go critical and the ship – and everyone on board – will be destroyed.
Jack and Daniel, meanwhile, discover a wounded woman in a crew uniform who warns that the android cannot be trusted.
***
Yes, as a matter of fact I did read that Stargate news.
That’s show biz.
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